Intel Purley Xeon platform offers biggest advance since Nehalem

[crossy]

No one is asking for a 12 core 5GHz cpu for £50. A 6 core-at-normal-desktop-i5/i7-clocks would be fine at around £200-£250. TDP covered by removing the IGP.

Can't see that happening - last couple of 'tel reviews have read, the focus has been on the IGP - the "ooh look you might not need a proper graphics card now" kind of nonsense.

I know they do not want to step on their workstation segment and lose sales of their overpriced chipsets and processors (hello 3 grand for an 18 core chip!) but when some GAMES are pushing DESKTOP cpus to their limits, you have to start questioning intels decision to keep desktop cpus to 4 physical cores, they had better re-think that and/or hope that AMD cannot pull a rabbit out of a hat next year.

And it's not just games - I've seen music fans doing rips and video fans doing their rips complaining that AMD's more-cores-are-better approach suits them better. I must admit that the unscientific "benchmarks" showed that a six-way AMD was able to give a major smackdown to a newer four-way Intel i5 for transcoding operations. I've also seen some feedback from someone who needed to do batch photo processing - again the more generously be-cored AMD was a better choice.

But then again, I'm feeling a bit of high-handedness on behalf of both AMD and Intel - the "we know best, shut up stupid" approach. And where's the big deal for sub-100W TDP's, people still buying 200W+ AMD "space heaters" gives lie to that there's no demand for performance at all costs.

At this precise moment, I'd be interested in a 6-way or 8-way chip for 120-140W TDP, but alas not at the prices that Intel want to charge.

[zaph0d]

If your really want a 6 Core cpu, get an old X58 motherboard and grab one of the X5650 Xeons.
The X5650 is a 95w 6 Core 12 Thread chip that works just fine in Consumer Grade boards with Gaming memory and oc's to 4GHz without even going out of intels specs for voltage.
I use one of these and it's pretty good - especially for only £65

[shaithis]

The problem is the X58 boards are getting long-in-the-tooth......when it dies you could be SOL. I relegated mine to a tertiary ( or even quaternary!) box when Ivybridge came out (a tad over 3 years ago) and at that time I had been using the X58 system for ~4 years!

I could bust the system out and swap boards I guess, my problem is how long it will run fine for......most X58 boards have had a fair few power-on hours by now and mine gets switched on just a couple times a year now.....

[3dcandy]

Well true but you know they're still capable boards

[zaph0d]

I've been using my Asus Rampage II since it came out, originally with an i7 920 running at 3.5-3.9 GHz depending on what I was doing.

When all the X5650's came on the market for pennies I couldn't resist it. Not only did I get a 50% increase in corecount, I also got a 20% reduction in power use even with the chip running a solid 4GHz. I've even got a spare just in case it dies or I can find an SR-2 at a reasonable price.

[shaithis]

You've got me thinking but the loss of PCI-E 3, SATA3 and USB3 is too much

[zaph0d]

The loss of PCIE 3 is irrelevant at the moment. There's not a pair of cards as can saturate PCIE 2 at the moment.
The loss of USB3 is also irrelevant - USB3 controllers can be had for pittance.
The loss of SATA3 - a little more relevant but even then can be compensated for. Anything beyond SATA2 for most purposes wasted. However I am aware that higher bandwith does decrease load times in games - I personnaly use a ramdrive for every game I play - at least the ones under 32GB. I've now got 48GB ram in triple channel, the bandwidth of that is far away and beyond that of any level of SATA. NTFS compression (surprisingly) increases the performance on ramdrives as well as allowing for more data within. OK you lose a few cpu cycles to de/compression but the most effect it has on my system is around 3% of the physical proccessing (I disable HT as a nuisance).

[kalniel]

My X58 board has SATA3 and USB3. OK, they're not the latest, most robust Intel implementations, but they're still a step up in speed from the previous gen ones.

[DanceswithUnix]

No one is asking for a 12 core 5GHz cpu for £50. A 6 core-at-normal-desktop-i5/i7-clocks would be fine at around £200-£250. TDP covered by removing the IGP.

Another thought on this, such a 6 core part would not fall into the tablet, laptop or server markets that Intel is really interested in.

Let's face it, these days we just get laptop parts with the voltage turned up a bit for desktop use. For business users that works out quite nicely.

[shaithis]

I think the 140W TDP of the 6 core chips says otherwise, the iGPU is a wide slow clocked thing, the CPU cores seem to be more of a hot spot.

Intel Xeon E5-2630 V2 6 cores, 12 threads, 80W

As for us getting laptop chips, yes we are but we shouldn't be.....nor should we be expected to buy into ws/server platforms for gaming.

The more I think about it, the more I want ARM to take over the desktop segment. That would certainly give choice if nothing else......

[DanceswithUnix]

Intel Xeon E5-2630 V2 6 cores, 12 threads, 80W

As for us getting laptop chips, yes we are but we shouldn't be.....nor should we be expected to buy into ws/server platforms for gaming.

The more I think about it, the more I want ARM to take over the desktop segment. That would certainly give choice if nothing else......

That chip is 2.6GHz, I wouldn't want to game on that. If you can overclock to decent speeds, then I guess you have something like the E5-1650 V2 I use at work. 6C 12T @ 3.5GHz + boost at 3.9GHz. Quite the monster, but so is the heatsink on it to deal with the 130W TDP. ISTR this is an 8 core server chip with 2 of the cores disabled so the clock rates can be cranked up.

My last couple of buys at home have been AMD which clearly start on the drawing board as Opteron products, the last machine I build for my parents has a Xeon in it. So I think I am OK with server castoff parts for home workstation & gaming use, as long as they can keep the clock speeds up. I have wondered with the last couple of CPU releases whether we are at "peak CPU" where from here on out we get more but slower cores that are energy efficient for laptops and high overall throughput for servers, but suck for gaming.

ARM would be nice. I was pleasantly surprised by my Pi V2, I look forward far more to what a Pi V3 might look like in another couple of years than I do anything on the x86 roadmap tbh. But then I was looking forward a couple of decades ago to buying an ARC machine with a nice big MIPS chip in it, so I won't hold my breath.

[Xlucine]

That chip is 2.6GHz, I wouldn't want to game on that. If you can overclock to decent speeds, then I guess you have something like the E5-1650 V2 I use at work. 6C 12T @ 3.5GHz + boost at 3.9GHz. Quite the monster, but so is the heatsink on it to deal with the 130W TDP. ISTR this is an 8 core server chip with 2 of the cores disabled so the clock rates can be cranked up.

An unlocked version of that sounds like what a lot of people want for gaming - it's got buckets of PCI-e lanes, 6 fast cores and no IGP taking up die space. However, it also shows how little you'll gain from cutting back on the IGP - even though the IGP takes up around half the die space, there's no real difference in the TDP because of it. A 4690K runs 4 cores + IGP at the same speed as this, but the TDP scales directly with the core count (88 * 6/4 = 130W). I would quite like to see something like that available for socket 1150 (without the extra PCIe lanes or quad channel memory, obviously), but there's no free lunch with it